Financial contributions to the Yukon's two major environmental organizations were laid out Wednesday during a lunch hosted by the Yukon Chamber of Mines.

Vivian Krause, a Vancouver freelance writer and researcher, explained to guests how contributions from wealthy American foundations find their way to Canada and the Yukon.

Documentation produced by Krause, for instance, shows the Yukon chapter of the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society budgeted $290,000 in the last fiscal year for legal fees related to its campaign to protect the Peel watershed.

CPAWS received most of the budget for legal fees from the Yukon Conservation Society, which received the money from what Krause says was the Wilburforce Foundation established by James Letwin, co-founder of Microsoft.

The total CPAWS budget for the 2013-14 fiscal year that ended March 31 was $710,000, all of which went to the Peel campaign as the Peel campaign is currently the sole focus of the organization, according to the documentation.

Documentation indicates this year's budget for CPAWS is set at $820,435, including $375,435 carried over from last year.

There's $314,415 identified for legal fees this year.

The documentation Krause produced comes from a funding report where the organization laid out its budget and explained its goals and objectives to Conservative Alliance, which contributed $35,000 for this fiscal year.

In last year's report, CPAWS outlined four areas of priority:

• empowering First Nation leadership and communities, which includes building a relationship with the new chief of the First Nation of Nacho Nyak Dun;

• launching legal action;

• maintain protection of the Peel watershed as a major public issue in the Yukon; and

• building national and international support for protection of the Peel.

Renowned Canadian lawyer Thomas Berger has been retained to argue for protection of the Peel. A one-week hearing in the Yukon Supreme Court is scheduled to begin July 7.

A pie chart presented by Krause to the lunch guests shows that for the years 2009 through to 2012, the Yukon Conservation Society received a total of $2.9 million in contributions, excluding the $253,000 funnelled through to CPAWS. Of the total, 31 per cent or $827,323 came from outside Canada.

Contributions from government totalled $750,255 but annual amounts from government have declined steadily since 2009.

Another $694,196 was unspecified, though Krause suspects she's on track to confirm where the money came from.

The lack of full disclosure by some organizations is bothersome for Krause.

If a tax receipt is not issued, she explained, there is no requirement to report the origin of the contribution to the Canadian Revenue Agency.

Krause not only finds the secrecy bothersome, but also somewhat nonsensical.

Charitable status under the tax regime is a privilege, and with that privilege should come full transparency, she said.

Besides, said Krause, if you're an environmental organization involved in a campaign, why wouldn't you want the other side to know you're being backstopped financially by some one like Warren Buffet, one of the wealthiest men in United States?

"What we want at the end of the day is to have the best minds at the table finding solutions,” she told the audience.

Krause said she's upfront with everything she does.

When she comes up with numbers, she always attempts to confirm them with the environmental organizations, just as she did before arriving Monday in Whitehorse.

The only thing she heard back from CPAWS was that its executive director was on holidays.

In an interview after her presentation, Krause had no trouble disclosing that the Yukon Chamber of Mines paid her an honorarium of $10,000 to bring her to Whitehorse, plus airfare and accommodations for five days.

But she also emphasizes when she was drawn into the world of tracking contributions from major foundations, it was an intense five-year exercise during which she had to sell her house to finance herself.

She's done some freelancing with big newspapers, though with the financial crunch in the newspaper industry, she wasn't able to secure full-time work or make a living from her freelancing.

Now that she has the information and experience, she sees it as only fair that she's duly compensated, she said.

Krause told the lunch guests – which included Gordon Steele, Premier Darrell Pasloski's principal secretary – that after she left her work as a nutritionist working overseas with the United Nations, she returned to the West Coast with an interest in fish farming.

At the time, she said, there was huge anti-fish farm lobby in B.C., but hardly boo was being said about the thriving fish farm industry in Alaska. She became curious.

There was a time when the environmental movement was a grassroots movement powered by volunteers working out of the basement, scraping pennies together, Krause told the audience.

"Since 2000, American foundations have granted more than $US 400 million for environmental campaigns in Canada – especially for the campaign against Canadian oil and gas development,” she pointed out.

Krause she did not want to draw any conclusions, though did make a few observations.

Right now, she said, the U.S. has a monopoly on Canadian oil and Canada is losing $25 million a day because it can't move it to international markets.

The Rockefeller Brothers Fund has identified the proposed Mackenzie Valley pipeline and the proposed Northern Gateway pipeline as globally significant threats, along with large oil tankers.

In its annual report from 1998, the Rockefeller Fund identified a relatively confined but distinct area along B.C.'s West Coast as

The Great Bear Rainforest, which was the focus of a lobby effort, Krause pointed out.

She said today, the Rockefellers Great Bear Rainforest stretches from the southern tip of Alaska down to Vancouver Island, and encompasses all shipping lanes oil tankers would need to use.

The anti-oil and gas lobby funded by the big foundations goes on and on about the oil sands and how dirty it is, though statistics show oil from the U.S. Midwest is dirtier, she pointed out.

Krause told the audience the U.S. is currently in an oil boom, and production in Texas has doubled.

If the anti-oil lobby is all about keeping carbon in the ground, she asked, why doesn't anyone hear anything about Texas?

Krause said there seems to be a double standard at play.

There is no question there is a very real need for large foundations which provide financial support to different environmental lobby efforts, she said.

If not for them, she asked, where would the money come from for the effort to save the African elephant?

And she believes these large foundations are committed to protecting pristine wilderness, though it seems their commitment is based on not hurting any of their own U.S. interests.

The Canadian Boreal Initiative, which includes the Peel watershed, calls for no roads, no logging, no mining, no hydro and no oil and gas in a least 50 per cent of the boreal region that stretches right across Canada, Krause pointed out,

She noted that from 1996 to 2006, Pew Charitable Trusts out of the U.S. provided $60 million in funding for the Boreal Initiative.

The Yellowstone-to-Yukon campaign – Y2Y – has also received solid financial support, she said.

All of the major U.S. charitable foundations, Krause pointed out, belong to the same umbrella organization – The Consultative Group on Biological Diversity.

She said Alberta can take care of itself when it comes to digging in against the anti-oil and gas lobby.

The Yukon Chamber of Mines, on the other hand, might be a little outweighed by the might of the large foundations supporting environmental lobby effort in the territory, she said.

"I am not saying this is wrong,” she said. "I'm just saying, ‘heads up, guys, don't bring a knife to a gun fight.'

"I am not saying you shouldn't have a fight in the Yukon. I am saying if you are going to have a fight in the Yukon, everybody should know who is on whose side.”